Models recently studied by Farmer (2012, 2013, 2015) predict that, due to labor-market frictions and "animal spirits", stock-market fluctuations should Granger cause fluctuations of the unemployment rate. We performed several Granger-causality tests on more than half a century of data of German...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

Most macroeconomic data is continuously revised as additional information becomes available. We suggest that revisions of data is an increasingly important source of uncertainty about the state of the economy and offer an alternative channel of uncertainty - data uncertainty. This paper adds on...

The paper addresses the topic of an overall long-term productivity slowdown in labor productivity for a panel of 25 developed countries. Besides studying individual long-term trends of single countries using filtering techniques we also test for multiple structural breakpoints in the long-term...

Utilizing the microdata from a first cross-section of a new household survey at the University of Hamburg, we analyze if consumers respond to their own inflation expectations and economic news that they have observed recently when they plan to adjust their savings portfolio in the next year. We...

We compare the formation of quantitative inflation perceptions and expectations from questions asked either in terms of price changes or in terms of the inflation rate in a new socio-economic household survey established at the University of Hamburg. In addition to socio-demographic...

Based on the approach advanced by Elliott et al. (Rev. Ec. Studies. 72, 1197..1125, 2005), we analyzed whether the loss function of a sample of exchange rate forecasters is asymmetric in the forecast error. Using forecasts of the euro/dollar exchange rate, we found that the shape of the loss...

Using forecasts of the Brazilian real and the Mexican peso, we analyze the shape of the loss function of exchange-rate forecasters and the rationality of their forecasts. We find a substantial degree of cross-sectional heterogeneity with respect to the shape of the loss function. While some...

Most macroeconomic data is continuously revised as additional information becomes available. We suggest that revisions of data is an important source of uncertainty about the state of the economy. This paper evaluates the quality of major real macroeconomic Euro area variables, published by...

Using corpora of business cycle report sections dealing with monetary and fiscal policy issues from 1999 to 2017 and using methods of unsupervised text scaling (Slapin and Proksch, 2008; Lauderdale and Herzog, 2016), namely Wordfish and Wordshoal we scale the institutions' theoretical/ideological...